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A montage of Jupiter and its four largest moons (distance and sizes not to scale) There are 95 moons of Jupiter with confirmed orbits as of 5 February 2024. [1] [note 1] This number does not include a number of meter-sized moonlets thought to be shed from the inner moons, nor hundreds of possible kilometer-sized outer irregular moons that were only briefly captured by telescopes. [4]
The three inner moons — Io, Europa, and Ganymede — are in a 4:2:1 orbital resonance with each other. While the Galilean moons are spherical, all of Jupiter's remaining moons have irregular forms because they are too small for their self-gravitation to pull them into spheres.
The moons so affected are Metis and Adrastea at Jupiter, and the majority of the inner moons of Uranus and Neptune − out to and including Perdita and Larissa, respectively. However, none of Saturn's moons experience this effect because Saturn is a relatively very fast rotator.
Io (/ ˈ aɪ. oʊ /), or Jupiter I, is the innermost and second-smallest of the four Galilean moons of the planet Jupiter.Slightly larger than Earth's moon, Io is the fourth-largest moon in the Solar System, has the highest density of any moon, the strongest surface gravity of any moon, and the lowest amount of water by atomic ratio of any known astronomical object in the Solar System.
Io, the third-largest moon of Jupiter, is the most volcanically active body in the solar system. ... In an intricate dance that occurs every four years, “the inner one slowly approaches the ...
3-hour timelapse showing rotation of Jupiter and orbital motion of the moons. Jupiter is the only planet whose barycentre with the Sun lies outside the volume of the Sun, though by 7% of the Sun's radius. [130] [131] The average distance between Jupiter and the Sun is 778 million km (5.20 AU) and it completes an orbit every 11.86 years.
Jupiter has surpassed Saturn with the record for the planet with the most moons in our solar system. The gas giant has a total of 92 confirmed moons, according to new observations by astronomers.
Metis is the innermost of Jupiter's four small inner moons. It orbits Jupiter at a distance of ~128,000 km (1.79 Jupiter radii) within Jupiter's main ring. Metis's orbit has very small eccentricity (~0.0002) and inclination (~ 0.06°) relative to the equator of Jupiter. [2] [3]